NEW YORK, May 31: Aero Contractor, a charter plane company based in North Carolina, is a front for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which uses the firm’s planes to transport terror suspects or agency’s teams at a moment’s notice to destinations in Karachi, Kabul and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, says a report published in The New York Times on Tuesday.
In a four-page investigative article which details the activities of Aero Contractors, the Times said when the CIA wants to grab a suspected member of Al Qaeda overseas and deliver him to interrogators in another country, an Aero Contractors plane often does the job.
If agency experts need to fly overseas in a hurry after the capture of a prized prisoner, a plane would leave the Johnston County and stop at Dulles Airport, outside Washington, to pick up the CIA team on the way.
Among the notable missions cited by the paper on which the company’s planes were used are: to drop CIA’s paramilitary officials into Afghanistan in 2001, to carry an American team to Karachi right after the attack on the US consulate in June 2002 and to fly a prisoner from Libya to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The newspaper reveals that flight logs show a CIA plane left Dulles within 48 hours of the capture of several Al Qaeda leaders, flying to airports near the place of arrest. They included Abu Zubaida, an aide to Osama bin Laden, captured on March 28, 2002; Ramzi bin al Shibh, suspected of planning the Sept 2001 attacks in Hamburg, Germany, on Sept 10, 2002; Abd al Rahim Al Nashri, the Al Qaeda operational chief in the Gulf region, on Nov 8, 2002; and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, believed to have been the architect of the Sept 11 attacks, on March 1, 2003.
The company was founded in 1979 by a legendary CIA official and chief pilot for Air America, the agency’s Vietnam-era air company.
The civilian planes can go to places American military craft would not be welcome. They sometimes allow the agency to circumvent reporting requirements most countries impose on flights operated by other governments.
But the cover can fail, as it did when two Austrian fighter jets were scrambled on Jan 21, 2003, to intercept a CIA Hercules transport plane on its way from Germany to Azerbaijan.
“When the CIA is given a task, it’s usually because national policy makers don’t want ‘US government’ written all over it,” Jim Glerum, a retired CIA official told the Times.
Mr Glerum, who spent spent 18 years with the agency’s Air America, said he has no knowledge of current operations. “If you’re flying an executive jet into somewhere where there are plenty of executive jets, you can look like any other company.”
Some of the CIA planes have been used for carrying out renditions _ the legal term for the agency’s practice of seizing terrorism suspects in one country and delivering them to be detained in another, including countries that routinely engage in torture.
The resulting controversy has breached the secrecy of the agency’s flights in the last two years, as plane-spotting hobbyists, activists and journalists in a dozen countries have tracked the mysterious planes’ movements.
The authorities in Italy and Sweden have opened investigations into the CIA’s alleged role in the seizure of suspects who were then flown to Egypt for interrogation, the Times said.
According to Dr Georg Nolte, a law professor at the University of Munich, under international law, said nations were obligated to investigate any substantiated human rights violations committed on their territory or using their airspace.
Dr Nolte examined the case of Khaled el Masri, a German citizen who American officials have confirmed was pulled from a bus on the Serbia-Macedonia border on Dec 31, 2003, and held for three weeks. Then he was drugged and beaten, by his account, before being flown to Afghanistan, the newspaper report said.
The episode illustrates the circumstantial nature of the evidence on CIA flights, which often coincide with the arrest and transporting of Al Qaeda suspects.
No public record states how Mr Masri was taken to Afghanistan. But flight data shows a Boeing business jet operated by Aero Contractors and owned by Premier Executive Transport Services, one of the CIA-linked shell companies, flew from Skopje, Macedonia, to Baghdad and on to Kabul on Jan 24, 2004, the day after Mr Masri’s passport was marked with a Macedonian exit stamp.
A CIA spokeswoman declined to comment on the New York Times article. Representatives of Aero Contractors, Tepper Aviation and Pegasus Technologies, which operate the agency planes, said they could not discuss their clients’ identities.